Arena Adventures: Pauley Pavilion

Arena Adventures: Entry #9

Arena: Pauley Pavilion

City: Westwood, CA

Date: December 31, 2010

Teams: UCLA vs. Washington

As my alma mater the University of Wisconsin was playing in the 97th Rose Bowl Game presented by VIZIO, I decided to make a trip out to California to watch that game and hopefully catch a couple other basketball games as well. On New Year's Eve, the UCLA Bruins were playing the preseason Pac-10 Conference favorite, Washington Huskies, so I decided to head from downtown LA up to Westwood to see historic Pauley Pavilion. I assumed that with all the history that has been made in Pauley in the John Wooden days that the arena was going to be one of the nicer ones I had been to. Boy was I wrong...

I give UCLA credit as a major renovation project is currently in progress to update Pauley by 2012, which I think is extremely necessary if UCLA wants to draw in the recruits UCLA should be signing under a proven coach like Ben Howland. The main thing I noticed was the gigantic spaces behind the baskets as Pauley is set up to push the bleachers back and transform into 3 separate courts when used for normal campus activity. The other thing I noticed was the fact that all patrons enter the arena at the same level and the only way to move about the arena is through the actual seating bowl as the exterior concourses are tiny. This results in traffic flow that is less efficient than the 405 or I-5 at 5:00 on an LA weekday.

As for the game itself, Washington was clearly the stronger team throughout the day, but UCLA played hard. Behind Malcolm Lee on the perimeter and Josh Smith in the post, UCLA was able to hang tough with the Huskies, trailing by a 38-31 margin at the half. Had UCLA been able to get better production out of Tyler Honeycutt in the first half, UCLA might have been even closer or leading, but Honeycutt picked up a couple of cheap fouls early on and sat most of the half. Isiah Thomas and Matthew Bryan-Amaning led the way for Washington in the first half.

As the second half started, Washington poured it on and eventually built a lead of as much as 17 points before UCLA started a fast and furious comeback. Behind Honeycutt and Lee, UCLA was able to trim its deficit to as little as 4 points before a huge 3 was buried by Darrell Gant of Washington and the Huskies never looked back from there, eventually winning by a margin of 74-63. This was a big win for the Huskies to sweep the LA-area schools (Washington beat USC 73-67 in OT 2 nights earlier) and take control of the Pac-10 Conference title race early on as Washington State lost at UCLA 2 nights earlier. In the end, I think both teams played about how they were expected to; Washington looking like the conference favorite and UCLA looking like a middle-tier Pac-10 team with an outside shot of an NCAA berth come March.